Michael Bates: October 2007 Archives
OML Legislative Bulletin: Meetings Held on TIF
From the March 16, 2007, Legislative Bulletin of the Oklahoma Municipal League, about an effort by the public education lobbying groups to rein in the use of TIF by Oklahoma's municipalities. "Their proposal was to: (1) give themselves a final vote on a proposed TIF; (2) reduce the TIF time frame from current law's 25 years; (3). strengthen the TIF legal "but for" test by repeatedly complaining about the recent City of Norman TIF; (4) limit the public improvements (streets, water lines etc) available via a TIF. They complained about the City of Enid TIF; (5) split the TIF increment in half so they received half the TIF revenue up front and the other half would go to the municipality to pay for the development project; (6) remove the automatic designation of an Enterprise Zone as eligible for a TIF. They again complained about the City of Norman TIF; (7) strengthen the penalties for noncompliance with TIF requirements by potentially voiding the TIF if all the requirements were not followed by the municipality."
American Research Group: South Carolina Republican Presidential Preference
Can someone explain to me how Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney seem to have switched places between ARG's August and September polling in South Carolina? Romney was running in single digits, even before Thompson entered the race. Thompson was at 21% in August, and polled at 10% in September and October. Romney was at 9% in August and polled at 26% in September and October. All other polls show Thompson with more support than Romney. Are ARG's data entry people coding the responses incorrectly?
Hot Air: Video: Hillary Clinton flip flops around Eliot Spitzer's licenses-for-illegals plan
"Let's call this Exhibit A in the case against Hillary Clinton for president. In the following clip we see her radicalism, her shrillness, her inability to finesse a tough question, and her condescension to her opponents."
Jackson Free Press: [Editor's Note] Good Times with Recio & the Gang
In a comment on another story about Jackson, Miss., Mayor Frank Melton, reporter Donna Ladd posts this excellent quote: "Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear." -- Ambrose Redmoon
Reason Magazine - The Worst Mayor in America
Find some of our local officials mildly embarrassing? Meet Frank Melton, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. "He once stopped a school bus on a busy interstate because he 'needed a hug' from the kids inside.... He regularly suits up and leads SWAT-style 'raids' on homes, businesses, and even roadblocks in busy traffic -- without cause or a warrant.... He once bulldozed an elderly woman's house, promising to build her a better one. He then forgot to build it.... He keeps a house full of young men, including minors and/or felons, without having the proper foster-parent credentials.... I watched Melton and his bodyguards -- with submachine guns -- marched into private homes, walking past bewildered-looking tenants too afraid to challenge him."
"On its first weekend, the film did a whopping 10 grand at the box office in 7 theatres. That works out to about $1500 per theater, not enough to cover a single screening fee.
"How surprising. Who wouldn't want to sit through two hours watching an old man dodge questions about plagiarism, his book's extreme anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian bias, his illogical equation of Israel with South African apartheid, and his repeat offenses of snuggling with anti-American tinpots? Who wouldn't want to see the self-righteous man who helped usher in the Iranian mullahcracy hug his Nobel and chastise the president who is having to clean up the mess that Carter left for all of his successors?"
Townhall.com: Burt Prelutsky: Ann Coulter's Big No-No
"Many people, knowing that I'm Jewish, have asked me if I was deeply offended by Ann Coulter's observation that Jews are unperfected Christians. I could tell that I disappointed them when I said that I wasn't even slightly upset.
"For one thing, I am not religious. What people do or don't believe, theologically speaking, is none of my business, except in the case of Islamics who want the rest of us dead or at least kneeling to Mecca....
"Unlike most of the non-religious people I know, I am not opposed to religion. In fact, I tend to prefer believers to agnostics and atheists. They don't seem to be nearly as self-righteous and self-important. Perhaps it's unavoidable that if a man doesn't believe in a superior power, it tends to make him view himself as the center of the universe."
Townhall.com: Blog: An Open Letter to Rep. Ron Paul
"[Y]our columns have been featured for several years in the American Free Press -a publication of the nation's leading Holocaust Denier and anti-Semitic agitator, Willis Carto. His book club even recommends works that glorify the Nazi SS, and glowingly describe the 'comforts and amenities' provided for inmates of Auschwitz. Have your columns appeared in the American Free Press with your knowledge and approval?"
Townhall.com: Kevin McCullough: Obama's Abortion
Barack Obama's political choice: Votes or cash? Alienate black evangelicals or his extreme social liberal base of financial support?
WORLD Magazine: Joel Belz: Confessing our weaknesses
"Here, I want to confess explicitly some of the embarrassing weaknesses of Christian education, all too apparent in both school and homeschool versions.... 2. In our support and development of textbooks and curriculum for our new programs, we have sometimes backed materials that were just as propagandistic on our side of issues as were the materials that so infuriated us from the secular side. 3. We have too often offered parents nothing more than a 'cleaned up' version of secularism. We've removed the ugly parts, but the product we've offered hasn't always been thoughtfully Christian--even though that's what we said we were offering and what we charged tuition for."
WORLD April 28, 2001: Susan Olasky: Dif'rent strokes
"Over the past 16 years our four sons have attended four different types of Christian schools. We've had children in a Lutheran school, a small school rooted in the Christian Reformed tradition, a large Southern Baptist school, and a classical Christian school. While some parents think there is one ideal type of Christian school, we've come to believe that no school has the corner on educational wisdom. Children differ and the types of schools that suit them will differ. But all good schools will share three important attributes: vision, leadership, and love.... We've seen four very different types of schools, but all of them--and Christian educators generally--face tough questions. How should they maintain academic excellence while realizing that not all children will be scholars? How can tuition be kept low enough to avoid economic segregation, and perhaps racial and ethnic segregation as well? How can we help children to love God in a society where they are propagandized to love just about everything else?"
Dallas Observer Blog: How Jesus Found Dawn Eden Goldstein
"I realized that the first kind of rebellion, Chesterton was saying [in The Man Who Was Thursday], was the false rebellion, and the second kind was the true rebellion. And Chesterton thought the true rebellion was Christian. Reading that and realizing that I myself had gone through life identifying with the anarchists, the false rebels, I felt like a poseur. At the same time, I couldn't quite reconcile it -- I could see that Chesterton was an exciting writer, and I really wanted to side with him, but I couldn't imagine Christians being as exciting as he made them out to be ... I just thought Christians were this faceless, white-bread Moral Majority mass who ruled the world. And I thought that the only way I could be an individual and a rebel was to rebel against them."
Michelle Malkin: See-Dubya: What did the Founding Fathers say about immigration?
See-Dubya, guest-blogging at michellemalkin.com, provides excerpts from a 1790 congressional debate on immigration: "[W]hen offered a bill to naturalize immigrants after only one year of residence, the Congress of 1790 balked and began a fascinating debate about whether they were selling citizenship too cheaply.... [T]hough the Founders encouraged immigration, they were clear that an immigration policy should first and foremost serve the national interest. The specifics were a contentious issue back then as well. In fact, many of the arguments made by Congressmen in 1790 sound eerily familiar to those being discussed today...."
Scarborough Reports: Top Blogging Markets
8% of Tulsa-area adults are bloggers? That's what Scarborough Research says. OKC has us beat with 9%. Austin is the top blogging market in the country -- 15%.
Scarborough's definition of "blogger" is rather broad (emphasis added): "Adult who has read or contributed to a blog within the past 30 days." Still, with an adult population in the Tulsa DMA of about one million, that's 80,000 people reading or contributing to blogs.
You can read the report (PDF) here.
The Old Schoolhouse Magazine: Homeschooling and Classical Christian Education
Gene Edward Veith on classical education: "If you go back to the Romans and the Greeks, there were basically two kinds of education. Slaves were taught to do their job and do it well and only know what to do to contribute to the economy. But the other education was for the free citizens of the Greek democracy or the Roman republic. For those free societies to work, the citizen had to take part in the decisions that were necessary, to weigh the facts and analyze problems, to plan a good course of action. One had to have a certain kind of education to be a citizen equipped in the running of the country. Citizens had to be able to use their minds, think clearly, have a knowledge bank, and persuade others of their ideas. To develop leaders and other cultural contributors, the objective was to cultivate every part of the human mind as much as possible.
"The liberal arts were put together into a system by Christians in the early church. There was the trivium, meaning the three ways... grammar, logic, and rhetoric. This was designed to train someone to think and use language well. Every subject has a 'grammar' -- basic rules and laws and facts that you just need to know. But it's not enough to just know a bunch of facts; you also need to be able to think. So after grammar comes logic, where you learn to understand what you've learned. That's not enough, either. Rhetoric is the ability to creatively express and apply what you've learned."
OSCN Found Document: HOLWAY v. WORLD PUBL. CO.
Interesting: In 1935, the engineer who oversaw the Spavinaw water project for the City of Tulsa (W. R. Holway, MIT '15) was harshly criticized by the World for cost overruns and unjustified expenses. Holway sued the World for libel but was unsuccessful, and the Supreme Court rejected his appeal. The attacks weren't libelous because they didn't falsely impute a crime to Holway, a public official.
OpinionJournal: Stephen Moore: Comfy With K Street
"Meanwhile, Democrats under Rep. Rahm Emanuel and Sen. Schumer have quietly erected their own K Street Project, and employ some of the same strong-arm tactics they once deplored. 'I've never felt the squeeze that we're under now to give to Democrats and to hire them,' says one telecom industry representative. 'They've put out the word that if you have an issue on trade, taxes, or regulation, you'd better be a donor and you'd better not be part of any effort to run ads against our freshmen incumbents.'...
"Former Republican House majority leader Dick Armey explains that 'the business groups are simply not ideological givers. They give to buy access and to minimize risk.'
"He's undoubtedly right. And so, if Democrats run the table in 2008, they will have corporate America to thank. But business is living in a fantasy world if they believe this will spare them from what is likely to be one of the most anti-growth agendas that Washington has seen in many decades. Nor should they be spared. When you sell the rope to the hangman, you deserve to have a noose around your neck."
Macleans.ca: Mark Steyn: The 'cold civil war' in the U.S.
"Life is good, food is plentiful, there are a million and one distractions. In advanced democracies, politics is not everything, and we get on with our lives. In a sense, we outsource politics to those who want it most and participate albeit fitfully in whatever parameters of discourse emerge." (Via Alarming News.)
The American Spectator: A Tale of Two Candidates
Quin Hillyer, former editorial writer for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: "Ask lots of folks in Arkansas, including Republicans, and a fair number will probably tell you that Huck is for Huck is for Huck. National media folks like David Brooks, dealing in surface appearances only, rave about what a nice guy Huckabee is, and a moral exemplar to boot. If they only did a little homework, they would discover a guy with a thin skin, a nasty vindictive streak, and a long history of imbroglios about questionable ethics."
Faster, Please!: Maybe We're Winning in Iraq
Michael Ledeen looks to counterinsurgency theory to explain the dramatic successes in Anbar, Basra, and elsewhere: "In the early phases of the conflict, the people remain as neutral as they can, simply trying to stay alive. As the war escalates, they are eventually forced to make a choice, to place a bet, and that bet becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The people have the winning piece on the board: intelligence. Once the Iraqis decided that we were going to win, they provided us with information about the terrorists: who they were, where they were, what they were planning, where their weapons were stashed, and so forth....
"There is a tendency to treat the surge as a mere increase in numbers, but its most important component was the change in doctrine. Instead of keeping too many of our soldiers off the battlefield in remote and heavily fortified mega-bases, we put them into the field. Instead of reacting to the terrorists' initiatives, we went after them. No longer were we going to maintain the polite fiction that we were in Iraq to train the locals so that they could fight the war. Instead, we aggressively engaged our enemies. It was at that point that the Iraqi people placed their decisive bet." (Via Ace.)
Arcane Radio Trivia: Flour power
Radio, live music, and flour: It's a combination that dates back at least as far as the Light Crust Doughboys from the Burris Mill. You've no doubt heard of the King Biscuit Flour Hour. And as far as I know, you can still hear ads for "Martha White's self-rising flour / That all-purpose flour" every weekend on the Grand Ole Opry. (Or you NPR types may be more familiar with Garrison Keillor's homage to the Martha White ads -- "Powdermilk Biscuits in the big blue box -- heavens, they're tasty and expeditious!") This blog entry mentions nine different flour sponsors of music on radio, but I'm surprised he overlooks "Play Boy Flour," the brand created by Bob Wills with Red Star Milling Company as a sponsor of his own broadcasts. (More about Play Boy Flour here.)
Taking it Back to the Roots!: The ringing sounds of Cindy Cashdollar
"The next time [steel guitarist Cindy] Cashdollar saw [Van] Morrison in concert, she was behind him, seated at her nonpedal steel guitar. Having seen her in Asleep at the Wheel, Morrison hired Cashdollar in 2006 to tour in support of 'Pay the Devil,' his country departure album. 'That tour was great,' she says, 'very challenging.' For starters, Morrison wanted Cashdollar, who is used to well-timed fills, to play constantly. Then, when Morrison canned the horn section in mid-tour, Cashdollar and fiddler Jason Roberts (another Wheelster) had only four days to learn how to cover for the missing horns." (Using stringed instruments to substitute for horns goes back at least as far as Bob Wills' post-WWII band, which used horn voicings for fiddle, guitar, steel, and mandolin to great effect.)
CL&P Blog: All Criticism of This Website Is Hereby Forbidden
A website's "Privacy and User Agreement" says, in a nutshell: "You can't link to us, you can't quote from us, and you can't criticize us without our permission." No, not the Tulsa World, but Inventor-Link. (Via Ron Coleman at Likelihood of Confusion, who told the Whirled where to get off when they tried a similar stunt.)
Townhall.com: Amanda Carpenter: Earmark War on the Senate Floor
Okla. Sen. Tom Coburn and his allies defeated flower-power pork barrel spending, eliminating an earmark for a Woodstock Festival museum, but they fell short in trying to eliminate spending on U. S. Rep. Charles Rangel's Federally-funded monument to himself.
Ephemeral Isle: The Habit and the Hijab
A female airport security official wearing a hijab frisks an elderly nun: "The absurdity of airport security in the United States summed up in one image."
The Law of Mobility: MIT-Stanford VLAB - who "owns" your location?
Russ McGuire of Sprint Nextel writes regarding what mobile telephone service providers might be able to do for you based on where you are: "I argued that 'ownership' is the wrong concept since 'where someone is' does not fit the model for intellectual property - information that can be owned. The real question is who can control how that information is used and who can make money from its use?"
Yet Another Small Town Moment: A week without red meat is like...
Quahogs, clam cakes, Dunkin Donuts, coffee milk with Autocrat syrup, and "Awful Awfuls": How to eat in Rhode Island.
OpinionJournal: Rhodes Cook: College Try
California may join Maine and Nebraska by electing its presidential electors by congressional district, rather than winner-take-all statewide. Rhodes Cook looks at how such an approach, applied in every state, would have affected presidential elections going back to 1960. (Nixon would have won in 1960 -- voting by district would have prevented fraud in Chicago from affecting more than the city's own congressional districts -- and the 1976 election would have ended in a 269-269 tie!)
Townhall.com: John Hawkins: The Conservative Case For Fred Thompson In 2008
Among other reasons: "In the movie Roadhouse, another Dalton, played by Patrick Swayze said, 'I want you to be nice until it's time to not be nice.' Fred [Thompson] has this down to an art form. Typically, he's a pleasant, sharp witted man who comes across like a more politically astute version of most people's grandfathers. But, when he feels a need to punch back, he has shown that unlike the GOP's current standard-bearer, he's up to the task."
Meanwhile, Ann Coulter begs to differ: "Conservatives unhappy with our Republican presidential candidates seem to be drifting aimlessly toward Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee in the misguided belief that these candidates are more conservative than Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. This is like breaking up with Bobby Brown so you can date Phil Spector." Thompson's unforgivable sin in Coulter's eyes: Failing to vote to convict Bill Clinton.
Mister Fixit: Three-way switch description
Simplest, clearest explanation and diagram I've found of how a three-way light switch works. The only thing to keep in mind is that what he has labeled as "A" and "B" (the traveler screws) are, in a typical three-way switch, opposite each other at the top of the switch. This Lowe's guide to three-way switches helped complete the picture.
Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats
Can't open a .docx attachment in your older version of Word? Here's the solution.
Lifehacker: Sleep: Reboot Your Brain with a Caffeine Nap
Drink a cup of coffee before you take a short nap? Really. (Via American Digest.)
Seven Seconds of Love: Winners
"I said, who's winning?"
"We're all winning!"
Happy ska kittens celebrate!
When is a child old enough to play in the yard without supervision? To walk by himself to a friend's house? To ride his bike out of sight? And what rules and tools do you use to keep him safe? Read what other parents are doing and add your own ideas.
Head Injury Theater: Stupid Monsters someone was paid to make = the best job ever.
A review of the dorkiest monsters in the dorky world of D&D: Squarks, armadillephants, flumphs, and duckbunnies, carnivorous floors, walls, ceilings, and luggage, and the dreaded Gelatinous Cube! With a classical bonus -- Pliny the Elder's fire-pooping Bonnacon! (Via Ace of Spades HQ.)
krmg.com: Inside krmg.com KRMG Talk Programs - Now Heard Earlier!
Another loss for local news content: KRMG cancels its long-running Midday Oklahoma noon news hour. Paul Harvey shifts earlier to 11:45, and Neil Boortz will run from 8:30 to 11:45.
Tulsa World: Mike Strain: Why I have OU ranked lower than the rest of America
The World's sports editor (an OU grad himself) explains why he put the Sooners ninth in his vote in this week's AP top 25, three slots lower than the consensus, and explains some of his other picks. "The Sooners have a win over one ranked team - Texas. But OU's other wins don't look very impressive, especially with Miami's loss this week to North Carolina and Tulsa's loss to UTEP. OU's only true road game (trip to Tulsa was more like a neutral site) the Sooners lost to Colorado and were outplayed in that one." Makes sense to me. If only the folks in the newsroom and on the editorial page were as transparent about their judgment calls.
The Pioneer Woman Cooks!: Pioneer Woman's Favorite Sandwich
Glorified grilled cheese: Cheddar, provolone, rye bread, a Dijon mustard and mayonnaise sauce, red onion, green chiles, tomato, and butter for grilling. (Via Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, Best Overall Blog in the 2007 Okie Blog Awards.)
Minor League Ballparks: Ballpark Burnout
This is a cool website (photos and descriptions of 200 minor league ballparks) with a sad ending:
"It's official: I'm retiring. Here's the ugly truth -- going to ballgames simply isn't as much fun as it was 10 or 15 years ago. LED video displays, never-ending sound effects, constantly-changing corporate stadium names, blaring music, commercials between innings, and spiraling prices have all conspired to send me running for the exits (and even the exits probably have corporate sponsors now). Besides, most of the interesting old parks are either gone or sit unused, replaced by the color-by-numbers uniformity of new ballparks. It's true, I've seen professional baseball at over 200 ballparks in all 48 continental states, and that's enough. Why?
"Because a trip to the ballpark these days is something like a cross between going to a shopping mall and becoming trapped in a baseball-themed pinball machine.
"That's why I'm packing it in. It's been a fun decade and a half -- I've met a lot of great people and seen a lot of cool things. But still, enough is enough. "
CNN.com: S.E. Hinton and the groundbreaking 'Outsiders'
An interview with the Tulsa author on the 40th anniversary of the classic teen novel. (Via Karol of Alarming News who says it was her favorite childhood book.)
Amaizing! A farmer north of Shawnee has carved a maze into his cornfield. The design incorporates the official Oklahoma Centennial logo. Click the link for details on hours of admission, fees, and extra attractions, like the corn cannon.
Instapundit.com - On Harkin's ad hominem attack on Limbaugh
Prof. Reynolds nails it: "IT'S NOT A 'SMEAR' -- it's better understood as 'battlespace preparation.' And the target is the traditional media; the intent is to limit the ability of people like Limbaugh or O'Reilly to drive stories in the mainstream news as we get closer to the election."
Notes from the Lounge: Libertarian Liberalism
Quote of the day: "What libertarians would like to see, in effect, is a government too restrained to be worth the trouble of buying."
Later in the same piece: "The reason so much of what the state does is either direct or indirect corporate welfare is that almost nobody is going to have the time or inclination to monitor each of a thousand little programs that impose a small (because diffuse) cost and provide a concentrated benefit to a small set of firms. But if the starting point were relative laissez-faire, deviations from that benchmark would stand out more prominently as aberrant. That would lighten the demands on public attention and action, making it easier to check corporate rent-seeking."
The Boston Globe: Jeff Jacoby: Getting away with art
"Either you are sophisticated or cynical enough to gush over the emperor's wonderfully postmodern and transgressive new duds, or you are one of those reactionary rubes who get all hung up on the fact that the emperor actually happens to be naked. If talent and skill aren't required to produce a work of art, if a striving for truth or excellence or beauty has nothing to do with artistic greatness, if craftsmanship and effort matter less than attitude and gimmickry - in short, if there are no standards, then why not fawn over an 'artist' who 'works with rubbish?' Why not bestow a prize named for J.M.W. Turner - the greatest landscape painter in English history - on a chucklehead who crumples sheets of paper and films people vomiting?"
